Website Usability Guidelines

About Usability Testing (1 of 6)

What is usability testing? In a usability test, representative users try to do typical tasks with the product, while observers, including the development staff, watch, listen, and take notes. The product can be a website, Web application, or any other product. It does not have to be a finished product. You should be testing prototypes from early paper-based stages through fully functional later stages.

What are you looking for in a usability test? In each round of usability testing, you should first identify specific concerns and goals for that round of testing and develop the test to focus on those concerns and goals.

For example, at the beginning of a project, you may be testing to set quantitative baselines (such as time, error rates, and satisfaction) for comparison to later tests of your revised site. For another example, if you have measurable usability goals, you may be trying to see how well the website meets those goals.

In a typical usability test, you want to:

• Identify any usability problems with the website
• Collect quantitative data on participant's performance
• Determine participant's satisfaction with the website

How does usability testing fit into user-centered design? Usability testing is a major part of user-centered design. A user-centered design process should include a series of tests developed specifically to evaluate both performance and preference.

When should you do usability testing? Test early test often. Usability testing lets the design and development teams identify problems before they get set in concrete. The earlier those problems are found and fixed, the easier and less expensive the fixes are. The more you test and change based on what you learn, the more confident you can be that the site will meet your objectives and your users' needs when it is launched.

• Develop a prototype
• Test it with users
• Analyze the test results
• Changing the prototype based on the findings
• Then repeat the test
• Analyze

What can you learn through usability testing? In a typical usability test, you may want answers to these questions:

• Are the test participants able to complete the task scenarios successfully?
• Considering successfully completed tasks, how fast do participants do each task?
• Considering successfully completed tasks, how many pages (clicks) does it take to complete each task?
• Do participants perform well enough to meet the usability objectives?
• How satisfied are participants with the site?
• What changes are needed to make sure that the site will enable more users to perform more successfully?